7 Deadly Sins of SEO and Online Marketing

The SEO trap happens when you are using techniques and strategies that worked even a year ago. The Seo stuff that was tried and true a few years ago would send you to page ten or worse now. The trap is thinking that things never change and that all the SEO whistle-blowers are worried for no reason.

Real SEO Takes Time; There’s No Sprinting For SEO

As a business, you need to understand that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t be in a hurry to rank higher, when you do you will be tempted to try some of the Blackhat SEO Tactics. You’ll look for tricks and hacks that will get you there faster. This will result in disaster, remember the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. Honest search engine optimization doesn’t happen overnight. The companies that claim to boost your search in a few days are using illegal, or black-hat SEO approaches.

It takes time to write and create the content and coding to move a site up the search engine rankings. An effective SEO campaign really pays off in the 6 to 9 month period after the initial optimization.

Not Using Google Webmaster Tools

Google developed the webmaster tools, now called Search Console, to establish better communication with webmasters. This is a must-have tool; you almost can’t do SEO without it. It will make a huge difference in your SEO. There is a ton of information you can get about your website and a lot of tools to help you understand how to improve your SEO and rankings in Google.

You can check for things like bad links on Sitelinks which are automatically generated by Google. Even though you can do anything to change the sites linking to you, but you can do things to add and also improve them. You’ll know if you should disavow backlinks that look nefarious, stuff from adult-themed websites or foreign language sites, from thin content sites or from link farms, spammy sites that have nothing to do with your niche and other sites with a black-hat SEO feel.

Inside Search Console, you can also search for crawl errors, duplicate titles and descriptions and much more.

Outfit Your Website For People, Not Google

Don’t get caught not having enough quality content in your website. I’ve watched a client fall from position #1 to all the way to position #50 in 24 hours due to keyword stuffing. You must write for people, and then you can’t lose. Don’t repeat keyword phrases; you must instead draft for the best readability and clarity. You must use every legal SEO practice in presenting the information, but also make certain you have enough info. If your site has less than 30, 35 pages, you are going to lose the fight. Google despises the act of keyword stuffing. Keyword means stuffing as many instances of your keywords as possible into your content even when it isn’t relevant. The new, updated algorithms are far more intelligent and reviews the material around the keywords to make sure it can offer value to the users.

Content Spinning

Feel free to repurpose content for different platforms, but don’t offer spun text to your readers. Just like keyword stuffing, spinning an article was a scheme in the Blackhat world of SEO. Some SEOs used the same content over and over often resulting in unreadable content that made little sense. You must make sure that your content is original, and not just a series of text that has different synonyms.

As well as spinning pieces, the days of 300-word blog posts are long gone. These SEO experts believe in quantity over quality. A bunch of poorly written content will not move the search ranking needle. No one wants to read or link to a crappy, low-quality articles.

Slow Or Unavailable Websites

Yes, speed matters. Your site should load in less than four or five seconds and should be up 24/7. Not doing this can and should be considered as a dangerous SEO practice.

Maybe it’s your server. A good hosting provider is essential for 24/7 reliability and software like WordPress, can help build fast sites that load within the acceptable wait time range.

You Just Can’t Set it and Forget it

Good SEO is not a one, and then you’re done process Google Search algorithms change often, and your website site should reflect these changes.

Backlinks Still Do Work

Press releases, quality content published to quality sites, guest blogging, link baiting with excellent information, this all still works. However, you should back it all up with a heaping dose of Social Media activity that drives links and traffic to your site on a daily basis. If you see an ad for purchasing “1000’s of backlinks that will boost you to the top of Google”, just pretend you are Indiana Jones in the first Raiders movie. When they took the lid off the ark, Indy couldn’t even look, or he would die. When doing SEO on your website, you need to make sure any links placed on your site follow the relevant guidelines. Even though the use of paid links are allowed, they don’t benefit you from an SEO perspective. They just do not hold enough weight when it comes to backlinking, and therefore are dismissed.

Don’t Duplicate Tags

The Content is different on each one of your pages on your website, and your title tags should also be changed! Don’t have generic description tags on each on of your pages.

Your company may be “Austin’s Digital Marketing Agency, providing SEO, PPC, and Video Production,” but that is not what every page on your website is about. You should write your tags that describe the content of one of your unique pages as well as target your right keywords

Traffic Costs Money…Don’t Go Cheap

You can pay someone to manage your organic placement; you can either pay Google for PPC or spend your own time, which has a dollar value also, doing this work. This equation is inescapable. Traffic simple costs money. It always has and always will. Think for a minute about the history of advertising. When an agency created a business future for you by driving a real need for your product, they got paid the big bucks. You can’t spend a few hundred bucks and build a business future. This is a pipe-dream fueled by statements like, “My IT guy said he could do that.” Yes, but has your IT guy done it for a real client? Has this same IT guy generated tens of thousands of real visitors per month for a client? Hiring somebody who can make a difference like that costs big money for a good reason.